The harvest moon is seen as a time to reap the fruits of our past efforts...a time of abundance in all its forms…a time of endings and new beginnings. As such, this 25th anniversary of the harvest moon that first brought me here feels like the perfect moment to let go of the Sedona season that has enriched me in so many ways and to fully embrace a new one. Where am I going, when and why? As the storyteller I am, the only way I can answer those questions is with a story…

People are always commenting on my prolific creative output (20 books and five screenplays). But what you might not know is that I was a late bloomer. I didn't start writing my first book, "The MoonQuest," until I was 39, having spent many of the preceding years doing my best to avoid all things creative!

I had no choice: I would have to trust. Unconditionally. And I would have to reassure those fearful parts of me that I have always been taken care of. Even during those three harrowing months between Portland and Sedona, a 2019 journey I chronicle in Pilgrimage: A Fool’s Journey, I was never abandoned. There was always a miracle…then another…then another. I didn’t run out then. Why would I now?

Not for the first time, I'm finding it hard to dig beneath the surface impossibility of my current situation to get to the truth, which is that the intuitive vision of my wisest self has never let me down, even when disaster felt imminent. Why am I telling you this now? Because I need to hear it.

When I woke on 11/11 wondering whether I had used up my lifetime quota of miracles, I recalled an 11/11 dream of a few years back that helped me when my faith was equally challenged. It helped again that day.

In classic tarot iconography, the Fool is always represented accompanied by a small dog. On the Fool’s Journey I embarked upon, reluctantly and fearfully, back in May 2019, that dog was Kyri. I had rescued him eight months earlier in Portland, but he would rescue me daily through the 93 days of that open-ended road odyssey.

It was a journey that would carry me more than 20,000 miles across half a continent and through 14 states.

"I am a writer. Period." I wasn't so sure about that while writing The Bard of Bryn Doon, which was such an intensely challenging experience that I was seriously tempted to give up. Often. And not only on this book, but on *all* books. Somehow, though, I managed to get through it, and I now think that my newest book may be my best yet! I guess I'm going to keep a writing after all!!

It took all the courage I could muster at age 20 to call Gay Montreal and stammer "I-I think I'm gay" into the phone, then take the bus downtown and purposefully talk about it, face-to-face, with a gay man.

It took all the courage I could muster at age 20 to call Gay Montreal and stammer 'I-I think I'm gay' into the phone and then take the bus downtown and purposefully talk about it, face-to-face, with a gay man.

That was my first coming out; there would be four more: at 39 when I reluctantly dropped the 'gay' label, at 43 when I married a woman and came out as no-longer-gay to my gay friends, at 50 when I lost the 'married' label, and at 54 when I came out all over again as a gay man.

But the first 'coming out' is always the toughest.

I have turned my life upside down once again: I have sold everything I own (not for the first time) and jammed the essentials (including my dog, Kyri) into my Prius and have taken off for parts unknown. Welcome to Week 1 of My Fool’s Journey, carrying me from Portland, OR to Billings, MT.

“‘Portal land,’ my friend Sander jokingly remarked back in late 2017 when I told him I was moving to Portland. As it turned out, it was no joke... You see, I’ll be leaving Portland on or around May 28. Likely for good.”

Whether it’s historically, spiritually or metaphysically, November 11 carries much meaning for many people. It carries a particularly personal significance for me: That was the date of my bar mitzvah. Yet that my bar mitzvah occurred on 11/11 wouldn’t be the only measure of the day’s import, as I relate in this excerpt from my memoir.